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4th Annual SymmyS Awards

“Dame Noon,” JFK palindromes win SymmyS Awards

PORTLAND, OR –

Best-selling children's book author Jon Agee and Australian Martin Clear each won two of the seven categories outright and shared a third at the 4th annual SymmyS Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Palindromes, held in Portland Oregon Friday. New Zealand's Jeff Grant took the Grand Prize with his long palindrome titled "JFK Talking Tough."

Agee's "West Angola" and "Dame Noon" finished second and third, respectively, in the Grand Prize voting.

This year included two new categories, Medium Palindromes and Visual Palindromes. To no one's surprise, popular cartoonist Agee won the Visual category in a collaboration with Clear for a cartoon titled "Tim Must Summit."

Clear, a Sydney computer programmer who won six SymmyS in the first three years of the competition, also won an YmmY outright in two additional categories this year. (SymmyS is the plural of YmmY, the name for a single award. Both are, of course, palindromes.)

Wind the only clock. Alarm the silence that in brooding menace sets ... what?
What sets menace brooding in that silence? The alarm clock? Only the wind.

Clear's other YmmY was for best Palindromic Poetry. His six-line rhyming verse beat out several "palimericks."

We Freer Few, by Martin Clear

We few, we few, we freer few
We nag nine ponies, net nine too!
Zanier after cesspool - pooh!
A hoop loops secret fare in a zoo
Ten intense in opening anew
We freer few, we few, we few.

Biostatistics professor John Connett, the runner up at the World Palindrome Championship, won the new Medium Length category:

The Wrong Order, by John ConnettBarclay ordered no pie, sir. Arise! I pondered royal crab.

Live entertainment at the awards ceremoney was provided by comic Dax Jordan, live via satellite from the famed Hollywood Improv comedy club in Los Angeles, and by Michael "Shoehorn" Conley, who played saxophone while tap dancing. Conley also won the Ymmy in the Nasty category for "Urgency":

Now sore, too rigid, I harass Sarah - I dig, I root- Eros won.

Other notable new palindromes are listed below. Video and audio of the ceremony are available to qualified media outlets on request, via the documentary film crew described below.

Coming Up: World Palindrome Champioship II

Agee, Connett and Clear will compete against reigning titleholder Mark Saltveit and others in the second World Palindrome Championship, a live competition organized by Will Shortz that will be held on March 24th, 2017 in Stamford Connecticut. A documentary film crew led by Vince Clemente and Adam Cornelius are producing a feature length film about that battle and the preparations of the competitors. Last year the duo released a short version titled “A Man, A Plan, A Palindrome,” and completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise funds.

The Symmys are produced by The Palindromist Magazine, the world’s leading palindrome periodical. Hundreds of entries were assembled from direct submissions to the magazine as well as a worldwide search for new talent. Competitors hailed from Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S.

“The SymmyS awards showcase the great new palindromes being written every year,” explained Palindromist Editor Mark Saltveit. “Many people think all the good palindromes were written years ago. These great new works show how wrong that is.”